buggery.org

A long, but pleasant and joyful, day today. From Wollongong (where we spent last night with my sister, her family, and my mother) we’ve travelled about 600 kilometres — over the Macquarie Pass to Robertson, then through Goulburn to Gundagai, and down to Albury-Wodonga, across the mighty Murray River to Wangaratta, where we’re now camped in a very spartan but dog-friendly motel.

The dogs have been exceptionally well-behaved, not complaining despite having been in the car for most of the last two days. We’ve seen the Big Potato at Robertson, the Big Merino at Goulburn, and the statue of the dog on the tuckerbox just outside Gundagai. Yes, all of Australia’s most famous and compelling landmarks, in just one day.

Tomorrow we’ll make a quick tourist visit to Glenrowan (where Ned Kelly and his gang had their last stand 124 years ago this month) then it’s on to Melbourne and our new life.

I’d write more but we’re both really weary. Instead, I’ve posted some photos in the Gallery.

Convict memorial, Newcastle. Snapped with my phone.

Just back from lunch with my big bro (he of the supportive letter to the editor) whose first visit to us in Newcastle coincides with our last day in this town. Better late than never.

A delicious lunch and a delicious opportunity to sit in the afternoon sun, drink red wine and discourse. The conversation covers politics, love, growing up and growing old, and the sad preponderance and hate and distrust in the lives of so many people and so many countries. “It’s so hard being alive…” muses Bill as we wonder about the difficulties so many people have in accepting and respecting one another.

Back home now and the house is strangely cold and quiet. Everything is packed, save my iBook and the china mug I’m sipping red wine from as I write. Nothing left to do but wait for the movers to arrive tomorrow morning and get on the road.

We’re sad to be leaving Newcastle – we met many wonderful people here and we hope we’ll be able to maintain those friendships – but we’re looking forward to the change and the new life we have planned in Melbourne. It feels very clear that this is the right thing for us right now.

We’ll be on the road for most of the next few days so updates to this site, if they come, will come sporadically. I’ll try to post some thoughts from the road and you can confidently expect a photo of us at the Dog on the Tuckerbox.

Ignore the awful headline and forgive one or two cringe-making expressions, and this article by John Stapleton in yesterday’s Australian is one of the better efforts by the mainstream media to come to grips with the complex reasons why HIV still happens after all these years.

Of course, the journalist had good talent to draw on, one of them being my husband…

So we’ve (pretty much) finished packing for the move to Melbourne. We have 81 cardboard boxes full of … stuff … waiting for the arrival of Big Strong Boys Inc. in just over 24 hours’ time. We’ve kept out the stereo, a corkscrew, two plastic cups, and two computers. Everything else is packed.

Right now, right next to me, my boyfriend is sitting in front of one of those computers, simultaneously cruising for sex on Gaydar and shopping for our wedding cake. How lucky am I?

An excerpt from today’s letters page in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Pro-vilification

I am a heterosexual Australian man. This year I will be my brother’s best man at his wedding in Canada. This will be a celebration of the love that these two men feel for each other and of the commitment they make to that love. And the Howard-Ruddock anti-gay wedding legislation can do nothing to alter or change that.

What the legislation can do is encourage and support those who seek to vilify people for their sexual preference and to hearten those whose narrow view of what is acceptable is limited to “people like us”.

Bill Kidd, The Channon, June 25.

Thanks, bro.

The Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby, ACON, New Mardi Gras and Sydney Pride Centre have called a COMMUNITY RALLY to demand:

• Equality before the law
• Recognition of our relationships
• Recognition of our families

The rally will be held this Saturday June 26, 2004 at 1.30pm at Sydney Town Hall Square. Come and listen to a few passionate speakers and light entertainment.

More information here.

What brilliance our policy-makers are displaying!

The Prime Minister has announced he’ll give more money to schools who fly the Australian flag. Obviously it’s a cracking idea, especially for those lefty schools full of poor kids. Let’s face it, most of those kids are headed straight for the scrapheap anyway, they might as well learn to salute a piece of cloth before they start lodging their (work-for-the) dole forms.

Well, here at buggery.org we’re a wake-up to this kind of shallow vote-buying, and I’m going to go one better. Whatever the PM is offering, I’ll double it, for the school which teaches its students to burn the flag, not salute it.

Meanwhile, the Labor Party has announced it will make us pay more for prescriptions so they can fund (please, let’s not everyone say “tax cuts” at once).

Football Fans Against Sexual Assault is a group of grassroots AFL and NRL fans disillusioned by the recent sexual assault allegations within our codes.

FFASA does not accept the club cover-ups, denials, excuses and spin doctoring and have set up a web-site in response to the situation. We recognise that sexual violence against women within the football codes reflects a larger problem within the Australian community.

Sign the petition here.

The solstice (winter for me, summer for many of you) approaches. As I write, it’s just a couple of hours before the seasons start to change again and the days start to grow longer (for me; shorter for some).

If I were a proper pagan I’d be dancing, naked and shrivelled, before the waning moon tonight, but I’m not a proper (or improper) pagan, so instead I’m sitting in my living room tapping on my keyboard.

Just seven (increasingly longer) days before we move to Bleaky. We spent most of today packing — my home office is now “the box room” and my dining room is now “centre of operations”. We’re more-or-less packed now.

Can’t wait to get on the road. We’re taking a few days to drive down to our new home, via Wollongong (to stay the night with my mum, my sister and her family) and then through Goulburn, Gundagai and Albury to Wangaratta, then through Benalla, Euroa and Seymour, and down to Melbourne. The journey will take me to parts of this country I’ve never seen, and I’m excited by that.

New horizons, new territory, new beginnings.

Just over a week to go before we move south.

The boxes are piling up in the hall and we’re gradually plowing through the nightmare of utility disconnection/reconnection, change of address for an absurdly large number of credit cards, bank accounts and everything else. Of course nine out of ten of these things have to be done over the phone, at an average on-hold time of 25 or 30 minutes per transaction.

With a bit of luck, if I spend basically the whole of next week on hold, we’ll be almost ready to move by the time the van arrives.

We have a new home. Today we — finally — heard back on the last of our tenancy applications, which of course had to be the one we really wanted. We got it. Nice three bedroom house in Fitzroy North. We move in ten days.

We started packing last night. All the bookshelves are empty, my home office looks like a bomb site, and there are cardboard cartons everywhere. Getting to the loo in the middle of the night is an obstacle course.

Moving house is a bitch of a job. After one evening’s packing, I’m over it already. But it must be done.

The old saying says you don’t realise how much stuff you have until you move. Rubbish. I know exactly how much stuff I have — too bloody much. Too much paper, that’s for sure.

If I were a lot more organised I would be carefully editing and organising as I go. I’d arrive in Melbourne with my paper-riddled life cleverly ordered, colour-coded, and whittled down to the essentials. Sounds very sane but it ain’t gonna happen.

Maybe the moving truck will career off a bridge and end up in the Murray River en route. I could start my new life with none of this crap, just a clean slate.

Sigh.

I really should have more respect for myself than to listen to ignorant bigots raving on about their stupid, mean prejudices, but here I am, listening to Parliament on the radio.

The House of Representatives is debating the Marriage Act Amendment Bill — the proposed law which would “outlaw gay marriage” (notwithstanding the fact that same-sex marriage is not legal anyway) and ban same-sex couples from adopting children overseas.

Right now, Tanya Plibersek is speaking, and of course she is the voice of reason, compassion and common sense. The lone voice. The honourable gentleman preceding her (didn’t catch the old bastard’s name) is more typical of the discourse around this issue. The argument goes something like this: marriage is the fundamental institution of society (so homosexuals must be excluded), marriage is traditionally between a man and a woman (and it can never change), and children are better off with married parents (and here’s the catch-22, kids: queers can’t marry, so they shouldn’t be parents).

It’s a very neat and tidy circular argument. And it completely ignores reality. Family — not marriage — is the fundamental unit of society, and families come in many forms. Marriage is only one way of forming families, but it also carries special rights and privileges, and in a pluralistic society, while those special rights and privileges continue, marriage should therefore be available to all. And children are best off in loving, supportive families, no matter how those families are constructed.

The honourable old bastard can’t see any of this, of course. Instead he talks about the “threat” to marriage and society posed by same-sex marriage and the need to “draw a line in the sand” to stop it.

This is the nub of my feeling about this issue. It’s all about the line in the sand. We queers didn’t draw the line, we have only ever argued that we deserve equal rights, we have never asked for marriage. But the line has been drawn. Its purpose is to contain us.

Our duty is to cross it.

(RoboRanch, via PlasticBag)

We’re just back in Newcastle after three very productive and enjoyable days in Melbourne.

The purpose of our visit was to find a place to live and we’ve been successful in that. It’s a very nice if somewhat small terrace in Richmond. With just two weeks to go before our planned move date it nice to have somewhere to move to. We still have an application pending on another place, so if that comes in before we sign the documents on this place, we’ll be in North Fitzroy, not Richmond, but in any case we’re happy.

As well as that we’ve had numerous strolls down Brunswick Street, coffees here and there, a tantalising visit to the Victoria Market, a night at the footy, a trip to the Laird and the opportunity to see Melbourne (and a few Melbourne boys) up close and personal.

Even the weather was kind. Good omens all round.

Christopher Hitchens on Ronald Reagan, in Slate:

The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump.

["Not Even a Hedgehog: The stupidity of Ronald Reagan", 2004-06-07, via Kirsty]

The postscript to this piece (about John Kerry) is deliciously sharp, too.

Can I also recommend “Reagan’s AIDS Legacy: Silence equals death” [Allen White, San Francisco Chronicle 2004-06-08] and “Ronald Reagan: Still the Teflon President?” [Joe Strupp, Alternet 2004-06-08].

…memorabilia!

(Found on eBay)

[Update: Maggie Thatcher is to deliver the eulogy at the gipper's state funeral on Friday. Apparently Reagan specifically asked her, although such a request must have come some years ago when he could still remember who she was.]

Who says we don’t have a diverse range of viewpoints in the media? Just look at next week’s Time and Newsweek covers:

There are alternative viewpoints out there (but there aren’t too many). I’ve been hunting.

The quality of the pages linked here varies (as does the viewpoint, not all of them are ‘anti-Reagan’) but they are worth a visit if, like me, you’re somewhat sickened by the mass hysteria of revisionist butt-kissing that passes for the mainstream media’s ‘analysis’. (more…)

There’s a delicious irony in this, or there would be if it weren’t so appallingly dumb and insulting. James points out that the New York Times, in its four-page obituary for Reagan, cunningly omits the same word that the Ronnie himself had such difficulty with. AIDS.

This is beyond politics; it’s criminal neglect, if not part of a deliberate agenda, from the newspaper which was itself so guilty in ignoring or mishandling accounts of the plague during the Reagan years. Now that same newspaper would have us regard as serious journalism its account of the life of our second-most-disastrous president, the man whose administration, in surviving its general malfeasance and treasons, marked the final disintegration of American democracy.

Appalling.

Ding, dong, the witch is dead.

The world has one less AIDS Criminal this morning. Ronald “Maybe the Lord brought down this plague” Reagan shuffled off his mortal coil overnight, and perhaps you’ll excuse me if I don’t post a glowing tribute.

His legacy: millions dead and dying of AIDS, the former Soviet Union now a mafia state, the Iran-Contra scandal, a decade of greed, the War on Drugs, and Star Wars. Thanks, Ronnie, how can we ever repay you?

Now, has anyone checked the Pope’s pulse this morning?

Just back from seeing The Day After Tomorrow. Predictable, overblown, sometimes camp and … thoroughly enjoyable. Laughed my head off at the sight of Americans illegally crossing into Mexico. An easy way to waste an evening, but a long way from art. But, as Patric points out,

this isn’t about making movies, this a uniquely american form of public theatre in which everyone plays their part in an enormous marketing campaign, they do exactly as they’re told to accomplish the pre-sold ending, they get rich, and we get a neat poster.

Speaking of posters, the Australian poster for the film has a tidal wave engulfing the Sydney Opera House, but there’s no down-under tsunami in the film. I didn’t really need, want or expect to see the SOH get trashed; Roland Emmerich had Aussies dancing on its roof after pasting the Aliens in Independence Day which was bad enough.

Which brings us to Jake Gyllenhaal, Hollywood’s heartthrob du jour, who we like a great deal more since James posted this ACLU advert.

Australian defence personnel have been aware of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib since at least last October. The Prime Minister, the Defence Minister, the Chief of the Armed Forces and the rest of the pack of goons that runs this country have been claiming, up until the end of last week, that Australia had no knowledge of the abuse before the release of the photographs in April.

Now Howard is performing a classic Howard manoeuvre: the Prime Ministerial buck-pass. “Blame the officials,” says our fearless leader. “Blame the ‘relatively junior officer [Major O'Kane]‘,” he says. (O’Kane not only witnessed the abuse, but lectured the Americans on “interrogation techniques” last year — can’t wait for those details to come out.) “Blame anyone but don’t blame me,” says Howard, “because nobody told me.”

Not good enough. The buck has to stop somewhere. Whether you “intentionally” misled the public or not, we have been misled. Someone’s head should roll.

Not bloody likely — not in an election year under any government, and not in any year with this duplicitous gaggle of morons in charge.

Where there is gay marriage there must be gay divorce.